One of the award-winning firms in this news organisation's Swiss awards programme for 2021 talks about how it intends to make its mark and what its views are about digital change in the industry.

Tom Burroughes, group editor at WealthBriefing, talks to Julien Couronne, marketing project manager at New Access, about this Swiss business and how it slots into the country’s wealth management ecosphere.

This is a firm with Swiss roots, serving clients in 18 countries via offices in Switzerland (Geneva and Zurich), France, Singapore and Tunisia. It provides core-to-digital solutions for private banks and wealth and asset managers. New Access employs 200 people and has 55 clients.

Within its “Banker’s Front” offering, a digital front-end solution, it provides client lifecycle management; client/asset view and a relationship management workstation; client relationship management; onboarding and KYC certification; and orders generation. Its “Equalizer” portfolio management system is designed for private bankers, wealth and asset managers; it mixes advisory and discretionary portfolio management; it has a performance calculation engine and analysis indicators; an alerts engine and real-time investment restrictions; reporting and investment proposal generation, and order management and rebalancing. Its APSYS core banking system covers areas such as regulatory compliance, risk monitoring, order management and payments operations. New Access says it allows business to be transformed digitally and improve client satisfaction with its digital front-end solution, including an advisor cockpit, client life cycle management (CLM) and a client/EAM portal.

What do you think sets you apart from your peers?
Digital transformation is at the centre of our activities, and we are proud to be able to support private banks and wealth managers to overcome their transformation challenges. Nowadays, the industry is in the process of a major transformation in which digitisation becomes essential and the desire to reach new types of customers is growing. 

All players of the industry are working to support this transformation, but I believe New Access has something different which makes it stand out. Our ability not only to enable digitalisation of the client relationship but also to provide an entire core-to-digital offer to our customers, represents what sets us apart from our peers.

How have you been able to work through the pandemic and adjust to the changed circumstances? In what ways do you think the crisis has affected the sector you operate in, and why?
In 2020, due to the pandemic, investments and project initiatives from banks and financial institutions were seen as a bit frozen. A context that was understandable due to the uncertainty related to this crisis. From our side, we had to keep our innovation pace at its highest and remain proactive to be able to face this strange episode we went through as a company. Of course we had to adapt some of our working habits, dealing with an increased time dedicated to remote working, and we had to keep our teams’ motivation and commitment at a high level to make sure we could provide a service to our clients in the best way possible. 

Following this crisis, we clearly noticed an increase of requests from clients and prospects to pursue the digitalisation of their processes. We believe the pandemic has created this urgency for banks and wealth managers to invest in their platforms to be able to address new rising challenges. 

What are the main areas of growth in your firm and are there any specific reasons why your kind of services are in demand? 
As mentioned earlier, digitalisation of banking processes is what will drive our activity. Our services are in demand because we are continuously looking for the solution that will be able to address the pain points of private banks and wealth managers. 

Please tell us how your colleagues have contributed to the success of the organisation? 
We can never be thankful enough for the adaptability, the resilience, and the commitment of our teams. They’ve always managed to deliver projects on time even though we went through tough times due to the complexity brought about by the pandemic. We have the benefit of everyone in the company looking in the same direction, we all share a common goal and that is what I believe makes it a successful journey.

What are the main challenges you face in this business - have you had to make any changes to adjust that you did not expect?
Beside the current context brought to the industry by the COVID pandemic, dealing with what we today call as “the new normal” is what challenges us the most these days. It’s all about dealing with new ways of interacting with your clients, but also with your employees.

What surprised us the most was how fast bankers and private bankers realised that dealing with confidentiality was no more of an issue even if, as providers, New Access staff were working from home.

We definitely moved from a culture where software vendors or consultants had to come into banks’ premises to do their duties, to this “new normal” where remote working and confidentiality can go along together. This switch represents how fast our industry can change and adapt to address new challenges.

What are you doing and going to do to maintain forward momentum and continue building success?
At New Access, we are constantly seeking to maintain the highest level of service and to provide our customers with the most qualitative, scalable and modular solutions as possible. To maintain forward momentum we must continue to innovate, listen to our customers and forge partnerships to enrich our value proposition. 

How will you use the award and industry recognition?
Awards and industry recognitions are key to us as software providers to highlight and bring tangible proofs of the high quality of our solutions. We are completely convinced of the high quality of the services and solutions we are providing, and we are so proud to be rewarded with recognition as the one received from the WealthBriefing Awards 2021. 

In what ways will regulatory changes to the Swiss external asset manager market affect your business (increase demand for outsourced services, etc)?
As software providers, there’s no doubt that any regulatory change to the Swiss EAM market will affect our business. 

Regulatory demands and compliance remain central for private bankers and wealth managers and we, as software providers, must support our customers with up-to-date solutions and therefore up-to-date features, allowing them to focus only on their HNW customers while being fully compliant.

We must, by definition, adapt ourselves to provide solutions that best match with the regulatory-driven evolving needs of the private banking and wealth management industry.